I don’t necessarily oppose the life-for-a-life ideology generally behind capital punishment, but society/humanity is in no moral position to dish out such serious and irreversible sentences with wrongful convictions being such a frightening reality.
I believe that ‘justice’ system vice occurs considerably more frequently than we can ever know about. I've noticed that people tend to naively believe that suffering such ethically challenged courtroom conduct can/will never happen to them.
Any wrongful charge, trial, conviction and punishment should be concerning to any law-abiding person. However statistically unlikely, the average person could someday find themselves unjustly accused and sentenced.
Ergo, whenever I hear how relieved people are when someone [usually a male] is charged with a serious or reviled crime — ‘Did they catch him? They did? Well, that’s a relief!’ — I mentally hear the phrase: ‘We’ll give ’im a fair trial, then we’ll hang ’im.’ And if I point out he may be the wrong guy who’s being railroaded, I could receive the erroneous refrain, ‘Well if he’s truly innocent, he has nothing to worry about.’
It is also why the news-media should refrain from publishing the identity of people charged with a crime — especially one of a repugnant nature, for which they are jailed pending trial (as is typically done) — until at least after they’ve been convicted.
I could have developed the point further, but left it at the suggestion that criminals' "opponents in the criminal justice system ... do not always engage in the acts that contribute to fulfilment of their job description." One of the prime factors militating against a fair justice system is the fact that we pay those who administer it. Well, where I come from we at least don't elect our justice system operatives, which I believe is a serious incursion into law enforcement's and the bench's independence.
I'm not with you, I'm afraid, on the eye for an eye thing. If we had no justice system, then each of us would need to look out for themselves. If I caught someone who had murdered a member of my household, then I'd be free to murder him. With no law against murder, that would be a fair thing for me to do. Well, there is a law against murder, but the State carved out for itself an exception. Where I am with you 100 pc is the miscarriage of justice argument: they are simply too frequent to attach a terminal punishment to commission of any crime. Someone once said something about sooner letting go a hundred guilty men than execute one innocent one.
The publication of names is an interesting point. In my country, we only publish the names of accused prior to a guilty conviction where there is overwhelming public interest. The paedophile and murderer Marc Dutroux was a famous example in 1996. You may be interested to read what I have to say in a more recent notorious case, where the identities of the 18 defendants have been keep confidential even after conviction, and I'm not sure I agree with that. In the same article I touch on the matter of the ordeal that standing trial presents: even when you're innocent it is a dreadful thing to endure, I can assure you. https://endlesschain.substack.com/p/sanda-dia-and-the-reuzegom-fraternity.
I dispute whether any act of violence by a state, other than in its legitimate defence, can ever be justified, if only because of the imperatives of the civilisation of which we pretend to be part. As a component of that, a state must show itself to be of more upright moral stuff than those of its populace who fall by the wayside, no matter how natural the inclination might be to wreak revenge. There is a scene in the film The African Queen, in which Bogart rails at Hepburn for chucking all his gin in the river. "It ain't natural for a man to go without his drink," says the boat's captain. The boat's passenger replies: "Nature, Mr Allnut, is what we were put on this earth to rise above."
Thank you Graham, for this interesting history of Justice. I have always thought that justice was mainly a side affect of civilization, being the need to protect one's property, which also led to enslavement, misogyny, and treating children as well as wives as chattel. You have opened a whole new pattern of thinking for me.
I am one of those dreamy eyed liberal progressives who think that if everyone was educated to the fullest extent of one's abilities, interests, talents, then most crime would disappear leaving only those of supremely malicious personality disorders (like musk and trump) or psychotic mental illnesses.
Now I'll have to rethink some of my collective wisdom. Thank you
This is a 15-minute article, but it could be a three-volume chronicle. Indeed, the civilisation aspect is something that I decided not to delve into, not here. The bottom line to that would be that the Trump/Musk administration lacks what is susceptible to allowing it to be called "civilised". But to do that we need to pause and ask ourselves what civilisation even is.
Like many things, justice, benefit, the length of a piece of string, civilisation is what you want it to be: the acquisition of skills in metal beating, or forming great trade routes across China to the west, the writing of philosophies and the exploration of science. We regard these as aspects of our civilisation. American Anthropologist Margaret Mead is cited (somewhat obscurely, but whatever, it doesn't really matter) as propounding that the discovery of a healed femur in a human bone from prehistoric times was indicative of the first sparks of civilisation. Because it shows that someone who was not injured saw a greater benefit in helping the bone of an injured fellow man to heal than in leaving him to die. Maybe he was paid to do it. Maybe he did it out of some greater calling. And maybe his buddy was the guy who could shoot straight. Whether she actually said it or not, I think that's right. Civilisation in the form of handicrafts, trading merchants, thought and discovery has to be predicated on one thing: the idea of a benefit to someone else. And it is that simple idea - "benefiting others" (even if it be for gain, mind you) that underpins the very notion of what is civilisation. What confuses the debate are words like "civilian" (one who acts in a non-belligerent profession, but who may nevertheless act belligerently), "civility" (presenting a calm, ordered exterior at times when the contrary is happening within one) and other uses of the word "civil" to mean just "amongst the population".
Now, the Trump administration is not lacking entirely in any of these things, but it has a strange view on civilisation.
1. How we must castigate Charles Darwin for his choice of words. If he had only said "suited" instead of "fit", his theory would argue the "survival of the most suited" and not "survival of the fittest" (when in Gone With, Mamie berates Scarlett for dressing up as a bit of a tart to impress Messrs Templeton et al., she mutters to herself "'T'ain't fittin'," and she doesn't mean the size of the corset). Whatever, he said it the way he said it and gave us two centuries of explaining to numbskulls what "fit" means. Trump appears to espouse the mantra, and apply it with vehemence, N.B. regardless of how the power to do so was acquired ("Sons do not suffer the sins of their fathers, but they acquire property in what they stole"). There's a lot of talk about "people who will die, or suffer", but physical action is currently restricted to immigrants (I'm not sure whether that's illegal, undocumented or all immigrants. It is what it is.) The idea seems to be to get rid of everything and see how things work. That's the reverse of what you do to detect an electrical circuit board fault, except this time, you switch each circuit off and see whether things keep on working just fine. It's predicated on the upset thereby caused to people like staff and beneficiaries being "of no concern", and therefore it lacks "civilisation" (remember, that means "having concern for others, for humanity's sake, not balance sheet's").
2. The order to destroy federal paperwork at USAID seems contradictory. The aim is to cut an agency that brings no benefit, but if you needed to evidence that, surely this paperwork would be useful? Maybe it's redundant due to it existing digitally elsewhere. Or maybe Musk means "gone is gone - we won't be reviewing this decision"; or maybe it means that they do as they want and no one will naysay them.
It is true: when you give something, there is a loss of assets, no gain. I discuss this aspect of giving in my essay "Eyes of Needles", to try to explain why the Magi gave Jesus gold at his birth. It's because the benefit was not to Jesus, but to the Magi themselves. Giving really is more blessed than receiving. However, accountants see things differently. If the USAID accounts show a net out and no in, then, if you're haemorrhaging losses, you must stop the payments. The soft power that USAID exercises is not "of any book value". It is discounted out of hand.
3. The general tone of "we don't care" that accompanies many measures ("we don't care if our operatives are racists, we don't care if they have access to private information without due clearance" shows a new philosophy in the US government. They don't care who started the Ukraine war: whoever it was, we're going to end it. We don't care who owns Greenland. We want it and we will get it. We don't care what the immigrants will do once they get back into Mexico. We just want them back in Mexico. If we need them to clean our toilets, we will get them back easily enough.
What his administration is doing is reducing government to silos of commodities. Remember Gettysburg? Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth? Well, this is government of the people, but is it by or for them? At the moment, Trump is relishing his election victory. Let's assume it was legitimate. Among the "right-leaning middle class", his purging of government is making him enemies. But not among the lower classes, who are jubilant in his purge of immigrants. That's what the purge is for. It is a slice of raw meat thrown to the grassroots support to say "Gee, thanks." But "care" is not in any of these silos. Care is what made government flabby and progressive and namby-pampy, and woke. If you want to purge government of those things, and the expense they bring with them, only "no care" will work. Because, as soon as you have any "care", you have an eternal argument about how much care is enough and how much is too much, and Trump is not going there. It's "no care", full stop. "We can't afford to care."
No care means no civilisation, in the end. Put it this way: previously, being oppressed (which is what we all are) was somehow endurable as long as those who oppressed us said they cared about us. We had social security and welfare and a menial job, whatever. We were grateful for these things because "they cared". We may have started to doubt how much they cared, but we still deceived ourselves that they did in fact care. It doesn't matter whether they ever did, in fact, because now they don't. We can see with the retraction of proudly announced DEI initiatives just how much of that sprang from the corporate heart. And that is the nub of civilisation: it is not trade itself, or "publish or perish" or patents for scientific discoveries or self-betterment through skills acquisition. It is existence in which there reigns an overarching sense of the advancement of humanity as a whole, and what that requires is less egotism and more caring.
Caring is something you cannot legislate for, but it can be reflected in legislation. In this article, I say "Never do anything for nothing, unless it's for you." It's allied to "If it's free, you are the product", because that is, without fail, always the rule. Nobody gives things away (except me). So, that provokes thinking: everything that Mr Trump is doing and will do makes sense. But what sense does it make? You can't afford to simply dismiss him any more, as a crackpot or extremist or madman, for madmen don't get to office. They may become mad in office, but the only one who was mad before that was George III.
Did Trump just redefine "civilisation"? Or is he destroying it and replacing it with something more ugly? The test will come when something like a jackbooted army goose-steps down Pennsylvania Avenue. If 200,000 people line the street to cheer them on, I'd run.
I don’t necessarily oppose the life-for-a-life ideology generally behind capital punishment, but society/humanity is in no moral position to dish out such serious and irreversible sentences with wrongful convictions being such a frightening reality.
I believe that ‘justice’ system vice occurs considerably more frequently than we can ever know about. I've noticed that people tend to naively believe that suffering such ethically challenged courtroom conduct can/will never happen to them.
Any wrongful charge, trial, conviction and punishment should be concerning to any law-abiding person. However statistically unlikely, the average person could someday find themselves unjustly accused and sentenced.
Ergo, whenever I hear how relieved people are when someone [usually a male] is charged with a serious or reviled crime — ‘Did they catch him? They did? Well, that’s a relief!’ — I mentally hear the phrase: ‘We’ll give ’im a fair trial, then we’ll hang ’im.’ And if I point out he may be the wrong guy who’s being railroaded, I could receive the erroneous refrain, ‘Well if he’s truly innocent, he has nothing to worry about.’
It is also why the news-media should refrain from publishing the identity of people charged with a crime — especially one of a repugnant nature, for which they are jailed pending trial (as is typically done) — until at least after they’ve been convicted.
Thank you for this, Frank.
I could have developed the point further, but left it at the suggestion that criminals' "opponents in the criminal justice system ... do not always engage in the acts that contribute to fulfilment of their job description." One of the prime factors militating against a fair justice system is the fact that we pay those who administer it. Well, where I come from we at least don't elect our justice system operatives, which I believe is a serious incursion into law enforcement's and the bench's independence.
I'm not with you, I'm afraid, on the eye for an eye thing. If we had no justice system, then each of us would need to look out for themselves. If I caught someone who had murdered a member of my household, then I'd be free to murder him. With no law against murder, that would be a fair thing for me to do. Well, there is a law against murder, but the State carved out for itself an exception. Where I am with you 100 pc is the miscarriage of justice argument: they are simply too frequent to attach a terminal punishment to commission of any crime. Someone once said something about sooner letting go a hundred guilty men than execute one innocent one.
The publication of names is an interesting point. In my country, we only publish the names of accused prior to a guilty conviction where there is overwhelming public interest. The paedophile and murderer Marc Dutroux was a famous example in 1996. You may be interested to read what I have to say in a more recent notorious case, where the identities of the 18 defendants have been keep confidential even after conviction, and I'm not sure I agree with that. In the same article I touch on the matter of the ordeal that standing trial presents: even when you're innocent it is a dreadful thing to endure, I can assure you. https://endlesschain.substack.com/p/sanda-dia-and-the-reuzegom-fraternity.
I dispute whether any act of violence by a state, other than in its legitimate defence, can ever be justified, if only because of the imperatives of the civilisation of which we pretend to be part. As a component of that, a state must show itself to be of more upright moral stuff than those of its populace who fall by the wayside, no matter how natural the inclination might be to wreak revenge. There is a scene in the film The African Queen, in which Bogart rails at Hepburn for chucking all his gin in the river. "It ain't natural for a man to go without his drink," says the boat's captain. The boat's passenger replies: "Nature, Mr Allnut, is what we were put on this earth to rise above."
Thank you Graham, for this interesting history of Justice. I have always thought that justice was mainly a side affect of civilization, being the need to protect one's property, which also led to enslavement, misogyny, and treating children as well as wives as chattel. You have opened a whole new pattern of thinking for me.
I am one of those dreamy eyed liberal progressives who think that if everyone was educated to the fullest extent of one's abilities, interests, talents, then most crime would disappear leaving only those of supremely malicious personality disorders (like musk and trump) or psychotic mental illnesses.
Now I'll have to rethink some of my collective wisdom. Thank you
This is a 15-minute article, but it could be a three-volume chronicle. Indeed, the civilisation aspect is something that I decided not to delve into, not here. The bottom line to that would be that the Trump/Musk administration lacks what is susceptible to allowing it to be called "civilised". But to do that we need to pause and ask ourselves what civilisation even is.
Like many things, justice, benefit, the length of a piece of string, civilisation is what you want it to be: the acquisition of skills in metal beating, or forming great trade routes across China to the west, the writing of philosophies and the exploration of science. We regard these as aspects of our civilisation. American Anthropologist Margaret Mead is cited (somewhat obscurely, but whatever, it doesn't really matter) as propounding that the discovery of a healed femur in a human bone from prehistoric times was indicative of the first sparks of civilisation. Because it shows that someone who was not injured saw a greater benefit in helping the bone of an injured fellow man to heal than in leaving him to die. Maybe he was paid to do it. Maybe he did it out of some greater calling. And maybe his buddy was the guy who could shoot straight. Whether she actually said it or not, I think that's right. Civilisation in the form of handicrafts, trading merchants, thought and discovery has to be predicated on one thing: the idea of a benefit to someone else. And it is that simple idea - "benefiting others" (even if it be for gain, mind you) that underpins the very notion of what is civilisation. What confuses the debate are words like "civilian" (one who acts in a non-belligerent profession, but who may nevertheless act belligerently), "civility" (presenting a calm, ordered exterior at times when the contrary is happening within one) and other uses of the word "civil" to mean just "amongst the population".
Now, the Trump administration is not lacking entirely in any of these things, but it has a strange view on civilisation.
1. How we must castigate Charles Darwin for his choice of words. If he had only said "suited" instead of "fit", his theory would argue the "survival of the most suited" and not "survival of the fittest" (when in Gone With, Mamie berates Scarlett for dressing up as a bit of a tart to impress Messrs Templeton et al., she mutters to herself "'T'ain't fittin'," and she doesn't mean the size of the corset). Whatever, he said it the way he said it and gave us two centuries of explaining to numbskulls what "fit" means. Trump appears to espouse the mantra, and apply it with vehemence, N.B. regardless of how the power to do so was acquired ("Sons do not suffer the sins of their fathers, but they acquire property in what they stole"). There's a lot of talk about "people who will die, or suffer", but physical action is currently restricted to immigrants (I'm not sure whether that's illegal, undocumented or all immigrants. It is what it is.) The idea seems to be to get rid of everything and see how things work. That's the reverse of what you do to detect an electrical circuit board fault, except this time, you switch each circuit off and see whether things keep on working just fine. It's predicated on the upset thereby caused to people like staff and beneficiaries being "of no concern", and therefore it lacks "civilisation" (remember, that means "having concern for others, for humanity's sake, not balance sheet's").
2. The order to destroy federal paperwork at USAID seems contradictory. The aim is to cut an agency that brings no benefit, but if you needed to evidence that, surely this paperwork would be useful? Maybe it's redundant due to it existing digitally elsewhere. Or maybe Musk means "gone is gone - we won't be reviewing this decision"; or maybe it means that they do as they want and no one will naysay them.
It is true: when you give something, there is a loss of assets, no gain. I discuss this aspect of giving in my essay "Eyes of Needles", to try to explain why the Magi gave Jesus gold at his birth. It's because the benefit was not to Jesus, but to the Magi themselves. Giving really is more blessed than receiving. However, accountants see things differently. If the USAID accounts show a net out and no in, then, if you're haemorrhaging losses, you must stop the payments. The soft power that USAID exercises is not "of any book value". It is discounted out of hand.
3. The general tone of "we don't care" that accompanies many measures ("we don't care if our operatives are racists, we don't care if they have access to private information without due clearance" shows a new philosophy in the US government. They don't care who started the Ukraine war: whoever it was, we're going to end it. We don't care who owns Greenland. We want it and we will get it. We don't care what the immigrants will do once they get back into Mexico. We just want them back in Mexico. If we need them to clean our toilets, we will get them back easily enough.
What his administration is doing is reducing government to silos of commodities. Remember Gettysburg? Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth? Well, this is government of the people, but is it by or for them? At the moment, Trump is relishing his election victory. Let's assume it was legitimate. Among the "right-leaning middle class", his purging of government is making him enemies. But not among the lower classes, who are jubilant in his purge of immigrants. That's what the purge is for. It is a slice of raw meat thrown to the grassroots support to say "Gee, thanks." But "care" is not in any of these silos. Care is what made government flabby and progressive and namby-pampy, and woke. If you want to purge government of those things, and the expense they bring with them, only "no care" will work. Because, as soon as you have any "care", you have an eternal argument about how much care is enough and how much is too much, and Trump is not going there. It's "no care", full stop. "We can't afford to care."
No care means no civilisation, in the end. Put it this way: previously, being oppressed (which is what we all are) was somehow endurable as long as those who oppressed us said they cared about us. We had social security and welfare and a menial job, whatever. We were grateful for these things because "they cared". We may have started to doubt how much they cared, but we still deceived ourselves that they did in fact care. It doesn't matter whether they ever did, in fact, because now they don't. We can see with the retraction of proudly announced DEI initiatives just how much of that sprang from the corporate heart. And that is the nub of civilisation: it is not trade itself, or "publish or perish" or patents for scientific discoveries or self-betterment through skills acquisition. It is existence in which there reigns an overarching sense of the advancement of humanity as a whole, and what that requires is less egotism and more caring.
Caring is something you cannot legislate for, but it can be reflected in legislation. In this article, I say "Never do anything for nothing, unless it's for you." It's allied to "If it's free, you are the product", because that is, without fail, always the rule. Nobody gives things away (except me). So, that provokes thinking: everything that Mr Trump is doing and will do makes sense. But what sense does it make? You can't afford to simply dismiss him any more, as a crackpot or extremist or madman, for madmen don't get to office. They may become mad in office, but the only one who was mad before that was George III.
Did Trump just redefine "civilisation"? Or is he destroying it and replacing it with something more ugly? The test will come when something like a jackbooted army goose-steps down Pennsylvania Avenue. If 200,000 people line the street to cheer them on, I'd run.